Native Emergence Theater, 1975--1985, and the enactment of Indian theatrical space by Red Earth Performing Arts Company, Daystar Dance Company and American Indian Theater Company of Oklahoma

This dissertation is a socio-historical reading and political/cultural analysis of contemporary Native theater from the period 1968 to 1985, which I call Native Emergence Theater. Besides offering a detailed analysis of national and dominant-society forces upon Native Emergence Theater, I examine how this new genre was shaped by the flow of power inside Indian country. My histories of Red Earth Performing Arts Company, Daystar Dance Company and American Indian Theater Company of Oklahoma are case studies of each company's use of symbolic and material Indian social space within western theater venues. I argue that Native Emergence Theater in particular, and Native theater in general, create, enact and reproduce Indian social space in polyvalent ways. My concept of Indian social space is a re-visioning of Henri Lefevbre's notion of social space as a collectively-engendered and culturally distinct combination of percepts, concepts and experiences. These experiences are given material and symbolic form through a specific spatial practice that invariably changes over the course of time, but always retains some of its original elements. By tribal spatial practice, I mean an overlapping band of intertribally-held percepts, concepts, experiences, and occasionally, social relations shared by otherwise diverse tribal cultures. Tribal spatial practice includes the Gaze of Relationship, a gaze which simultaneously connects and situates the viewer vis-a-vis other human beings and the world. The notion of tribal spatial practice emphasizes the importance of the Native actor's body and physical habitus in enacting Indian space. It also foregrounds the transfer of embodied knowledge as an episteme and a content throughout Native Emergence Theater.